


Power Within

by seashadows



Series: Tell Me Inside Out [5]
Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: M/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-05
Updated: 2013-05-05
Packaged: 2017-12-10 12:46:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seashadows/pseuds/seashadows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of Roy's funeral, Nathan needs comforting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Power Within

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the end of Season 4. 
> 
> "POWER WITHIN" is from Spongebob - it's a weird mantra, a one-off mentioned in an in-universe infomercial. I thought it fit.

They called him a robot, and despite what his body told him to the contrary, maybe it was true. Toki was gone, stolen away somewhere by that fucking traitor Magnus, and although Nathan and Pickles had screamed and wailed and run wildly around searching for him, Charles had done nothing but look through the smoke.   
  
Look, and silently pray that the rhythm guitarist remembered that he was strong – that Magnus had never gone through the shit he had back in Norway, and that he could (and needed to) break away from him.   
  
Somehow, he had brought the boys to the sub. Even in all the damage, the DethAmphibiPlane that had brought them from the submarine to Iceland still stood there, unharmed, with ever-faithful #113,329 in the cockpit. Would that Toki…no, he couldn’t keep going back to that. He’d drive himself insane.   
  
“Home,” he’d said to the pilot, and #113,329 had brought them all exactly where he wanted. They couldn’t go back to Mordhaus now, and maybe they never would be able to again, but this was their home for now.   
  
The boys were…somewhere, now, he supposed. Probably drowning their sorrows, and their duties with them. Knubbler had tagged along in the DethAmphibiPlane, but Charles couldn’t imagine that he’d be able to get the remaining four members of Dethklok to do anything productive now. Not even Abigail had made them get their album out in time for…well. Everything.  
  
Charles had never been a fatalistic man, but now – slumped on his bed, head bowed, even the injured eye squeezed closed – he wondered if this wasn’t, truly, the end.   
  
“Hey, Charles.” There was no knock, just Nathan’s low, uncharacteristically quiet voice outside his door. “I’m comin’ in.”   
  
_Dat’s what SHE saids!_ Toki might have cried out joyfully. Charles gulped. “Ah…yes. Come in.”   
  
Nathan seemed to feel the imbalance, too. Without Toki safely home, there was no boisterous, galumphing spring to his step, and his eyes were dull as dead moss. “Hey,” he said again, sitting on the edge of Charles’s bed. “Did Toki hamburger time?”   
  
“What?” Charles said. Nathan was blunt, but not usually… _this_ forthright. He deflected sometimes, even though he was absolutely horrible at it. “I, ah…have no way of knowing, Nathan. I’m sorry.” He inflected the last word. Nathan had apologized, but it had quite literally been gut-wrenching (on that note, maybe he needed a new liver), and that didn’t bode well for the thought of him having to apologize later in life.   
  
“So maybe he _did_ hamburger time.” Nathan’s face fell. “Oh, man. Fuck…FUCK!”   
  
Charles held up a hand. “Try not to get hysterical, Nathan. It’s not going to bring him back.”   
  
“Yeah, but…I should’ve watched him. I shouldn’t’ve let Magnus get to him first!” Nathan pounded a huge fist onto his thigh and growled. “And he fuckin’ _stabbed_ him!”   
  
Stab wounds. That could be an in. “Nathan,” Charles said, “did you get a chance to see the stab wound?”   
  
“Yeah, kinda,” Nathan answered. “Why?”   
  
“Undoubtedly, you’ve seen them before. You told me you did your thesis on dead Klokateers, right?” When Nathan nodded, Charles continued. “Then you tell me: can someone survive that kind of stab wound?”   
  
He could tell immediately that he’d said the right thing. Nathan’s brow-furrow slowly changed from freak-out to analysis as he chewed on his lower lip. “You saw it better than me,” he said. “It was right through the middle of his chest. Yeah. That’s where it was, right?”   
  
Charles put a hand on Nathan’s arm, squeezing the firmness of his bicep lightly. There was no question that he’d “let himself go,” at least compared to his early years in Dethklok, but his strength was still astounding. There had been more than one incident report that detailed Nathan picking up some Gear in a drunken flight of fancy and flinging them into a television. “The center, yes,” he said. “If I recall correctly, Magnus missed the heart.”   
  
“Mm-hm.” Nathan bit the pad of his thumb. “He wouldn’t’ve gotten Toki’s lungs, either. You know, that doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense.” He shook his head and whipped around, staring at Charles. “The Revengencers wanna destroy us, right? Motherfuckers. Why didn’t they kill Toki?”   
  
As much as he hated to do it, Charles knew he had to be realistic. “It’s possible that they did, Nathan. Even if the stab wound is survivable, we can’t guarantee that Toki is still alive. His coordinates don’t show up on my phone.” That could mean that Toki’s Dethphone was turned off (which almost never happened, given how much Toki liked to trawl Facebook), that he was somewhere untraceable by GPS, or that he was dead. Or that he’d left his Dethphone in his room, but since the Gears had thoroughly searched the place and not found it, he had to believe that Toki had taken it with him.   
  
“Okay, but you said he’s probably alive.” Nathan leaned his head on his shoulder, black hair falling over Charles’s chest.   
  
“Believed to be alive. That’s not the same as probably.”   
  
Nathan snorted. “Same fuckin’ difference. Why wouldn’t they kill him, if they don’t want us writing the most metal song ever and saving the world?” He made a face. “Ugh, _saving the world_. That’s so not metal.”   
  
“That includes you and your bandmates,” Charles reminded him. “Don’t get so caught up in reverence for death that you forget how much you revel in life.”   
  
A sigh shook Charles’s shoulder and rumbled through his torso. “Fuck. Whatever, Charles. Don’t be a, a…um…” There was a moment of silence as the front man tried to think of the right insult. “Titty-fuckin’ pussy.”  
  
“That makes absolutely zero sense.”   
  
Nathan stretched out on the bed, pulling Charles down with him and squishing him against his chest. “Yeah, it does.” Through the ear pressed against Nathan’s breastbone, Charles could hear his voice rumbling, as well as feel it in the bones of his head. “If a chick rubs her pussy on another chick’s tits, then that’s a titty-fuckin’ pussy. It _totally_ makes sense.”   
  
Charles rolled his eyes. “I shouldn’t have to remind you that this would be a terribly inappropriate time for you to get an erection.”   
  
“ _Hey_.” Nathan squeezed him a little tighter. “I wasn’t gettin’ a boner, _Charles_. Just saying, it does _too_ make sense. Or maybe if the chick has a dildo and rubs that on the other chick’s tits.”   
  
Damn. Now Charles was thinking about ‘real cool codpieces’ again, and the connection to Toki made his chest feel tight. In lieu of crying, he rubbed his eyes with his fingers and swallowed to get past the lump in his throat. If, and when, Toki came back, he’d make sure to hug him as tightly as he had after the rhythm guitarist’s ‘punching’ phase, only this time, he wouldn’t only be trying to comfort him and reassure him that he was loved.   
  
This time, he’d put everything he had into the hug, and he suspected that the boys would, too. If – and that was an enormous, colossal if – they could compose a song more metal than anything else yet invented or performed in history, then everything they did after would be metal by default. Hell, he and Nathan could probably come out as lovers and no one would give a shit.   
  
Nathan clunked him lightly in the side of the head with a fist. “Hey. Hey, Charles. I, um. I didn’t listen to you and now I’m gettin’ a boner.”   
  
“Great. Lovely.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Of course you are. Look, you can probably understand why I’m not really in the mood to do anything sexual right now. If you, ah, want to take care of it yourself, my bathroom is –“   
  
“Fuck, I know where it is. I’m not gonna go jack off when Toki’s missing!” Nathan tugged on him, bringing him down with him onto his bed so that they were lying in each other’s arms. The thought flew through Charles’s brain that perhaps Nathan had done this with another one of his bandmates…Toki, even, the one towards whom he was the _most_ paternal.   
  
“Nathan?”   
  
“Hmmm…yeah.” Nathan had crushed Charles’s face into his chest and was now rubbing his scalp into rawness with his palm. He’d probably meant to just run his fingers through the manager’s hair, but as with most other things, he’d put far too much force into the motion. “What is it?”   
  
Charles figured it was probably a good thing that Nathan wasn’t a father, at least legally. From what he remembered of babies and their heads, a hair-ruffling like that could lead to the spawning of some very tasteless jokes involving a blender and possibly some trees. And Nathan Explosion, of course. “First of all, you’re cutting off the circulation to my head.”   
  
“Oh. OH. Yeah, uhhhh…oops.” Nathan loosened his grip a little and replaced the pressure of his hand with his nose, nuzzling into Charles’s hair. “Okay, so…what?”   
  
“Have you ever done this with Toki?” Charles asked. “I don’t mean in a sexual context, just – you do occasionally take on a, um, fatherly role with him.”   
  
“ _Ew_.” Nathan squeezed him again, and for a moment, Charles had to concentrate on not throwing up as those powerful arms compressed his stomach. “I never did any _dad_ shit with him! You don’t do that with someone who’s grown up and shit.” He paused and let out a meditative hum. “Maybe, though. Don’t fuckin’ know. He crawled into my bed a few times ‘cause he had nightmares, but I told him he had to stay away from MY side of the fuckin’ bed.”   
  
“May I ask why?” Toki _had_ been known to wet the bed when he first joined Dethklok, but the Gears had been sworn to secrecy. Charles made a note to see if he had to crack any skulls at the earliest possible opportunity.   
  
“Uhhhh…’cause.” Nathan coughed. “’Cause I jizzed in it.”   
  
_Eeeeeuch_. He’d fucked Nathan, but even so, a blunt description of his private habits fell into the territory of far too much information. “I, ah. Yes. Well, given your…tendency to get erections, there might have been, uh…wet spots whose origins you’d have had to lie about. Am I right?”   
  
“Yeah. I jack off every night…except when I fuck you. Or you fuck me.” Had Nathan not been holding him, Charles suspected that he would have taken the opportunity to look down at his own dick as he talked about it – speak of the devil and all that, just to make sure it was there.   
  
“I’d gathered,” he said. “Nathan…” He sighed, unsure of how to word what he needed to say. At this point, he didn’t know what could send Nathan into a rage – what words would hurt him, even unintentionally. “You need to, ah…well. Have you found any ideas for that, um, song yet?”   
  
Nathan’s big body stiffened a notch. “Tryin’,” he rumbled. “It’s a lot of responsibility. Makes me feel kinda shitty when I think about it.”   
  
When _didn’t_ Nathan feel shitty for having to take on responsibility? Still and all…there was something there. Maybe. “Then write a song in that vein,” Charles said. “You’ve been given the responsibility of saving the entire world. That’s not something you asked for, is it?”   
  
Nathan sighed heavily. “No. _God_ , no. Never.” He rested his forehead against Charles’s shoulder, and Charles stroked his hair, like the fur of a cat needing comforting. “I just wanna be metal and shit. Not _save the world_. That stuff’s fuckin’ brutal. How’m I supposed to make sure five bazillion dicks don’t die?”   
  
The wording was crass, but Nathan had used far worse in front of him. Charles shook his head and decided to ignore it. “ _Make_ them,” he said. It was perhaps the only way that Nathan could pull one over on Selatcia; the man was god-only-knew-how-old, and…well, _frightening_ was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of describing him.   
  
Charles might have preferred _eerie_ , but then, that didn’t convey pure fear.   
  
“How the fuck am I supposed to do that?”   
  
“Your voice. Your…I don’t even know anymore. The force of your emotions? Nathan,” Charles said, “you sent the planet’s climate into a tailspin when you went on a tequila bender. You can speak to whales. You headline the most powerful band in the world.” A twinge of pride, there, for the fact that he could manage that band, but no matter.   
  
“Yeah?”   
  
“Yes.” He couldn’t doubt himself. If he did, then the band wouldn’t stay confident behind him. “You’re _Nathan Explosion_ , all right? You asked for a space helicopter and it fucking _happened_. If the people of the world need to live in order to defeat an evil… _thing_ , then you stand up onstage and _make them_ \- ow!”   
  
It only took a fraction of a second for Nathan to throw him out of his grasp and thump off the bed to his feet. He stood in concert pose, towering over Charles, the crags of his face shadowed and his hair flying as if by some divine wind (not the kind Murderface produced after bean night, either; this was real). “ _I_ ,” he thundered, “ _command you to LIVE_.”   
  
“Ah. Yes, Nathan, I’m alive.”   
  
“No, not _you_.” Nathan’s brow furrowed. “Everyone. We fuckin’ blew up Finland just by telling that stupid troll to wake up, and we didn’t even mean to do that!”   
  
“Yes, exactly!” Charles couldn’t help his excitement. Nathan was in full song-writing mode now, and he was fairly sure that nothing could stop him.   
  
“I command those dildos to live,” Nathan repeated. “I _command them!_ ” The pad of his sockfeet was nearly as loud as his clomping shoes as he ran to the door. “That’s it. I gotta use that line. _Skwisgaar!_ ” He wrenched open Charles’s door (there went another set of hinges) and yelled down the hall. “I GOT IT! I know what we’re gonna sing!”   
  
Nathan pounded into the hallway and slammed the door shut behind him. Charles winced when the wood actually _creaked_ with his passage. If only Nathan would use even half that amount of power when he found his voice –   
  
\- well, then, Selatcia could eat his ass, because he was fairly sure that the man was done for.


End file.
